This invention relates to a crop shredder apparatus and adapter.
In farming, after the harvest of some crops, such as maize or cane, it is desirable to perform an operation known as shredding. Portions of the plant still standing in the field are cut very close to the ground. This is done with a shredder, similar to a rotary mower, pulled along the crop rows by a tractor. The shredders are generally capable of cutting a strip about two rows wide, for the crops above.
The present invention treats the problem of combining several shredders to form an apparatus which will cut more rows on each pass. Some aspects of this problem have been dealt with in the design of mowers used to mow large plots, notably highway sidings. Features of such mowers can be seen, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,135,079 to T. J. Dunn and No. 3,115,738 to J. F. Engler. Multiple mower devices such as the ones disclosed in these patents provide suitable solutions for the mowing tasks, but they do not meet all the needs of a crop shredding machine. The present invention, by contrast, provides a combination of features that make it particularly adapted to the operation of crop shredding.